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Extroverts Don’t Belong on Mars
The Atlantic: Extroverted friends are good for a lot of things—serving as deft and lively wingmen, spicing up book club, sparking interesting conversations at parties by wearing ostentatious leggings, etc. One thing they may be less suited for: Long voyages to faraway planets. Scientists are starting to think seriously about a manned flight to Mars. NASA isworking on a spacecraft that could eventually make it to the red planet and back. Netherlands-based Mars One plans to send a team of astronauts to Mars in 2024 to establish a permanent human colony. That's right: the Mars One is a one-way trip. These people are going to have to get along. ...
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Science Confirms Looking Angry Gets People To Do What You Want
The Huffington Post: If you’ve ever gotten the death glare from your parent, child or S.O., you already know the results of this new study to be true. New research in the journal Psychological Science shows that people are more likely to give in to an unfair demand when they are presented with a threatening facial expression. For one of the experiments in the study, 870 people played a negotiation game, which involved deciding how to split $1 between two people.
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A Sense of Time Requires a Sense of Space
Scientific American: We often think of the abstract idea of time in the concrete terms of space, saying we are “looking forward to the weekend” or “putting the past behind us.” These adages may be more than just metaphors. A study published in January in Psychological Science suggests that thinking of space may be a necessity to conceptualize time. When people's minds are not able to accurately understand space, researchers found, they have difficulty with time as well. ...
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Why We Pass Some Cars, Follow Others
Cars are the ultimate status symbol. They also generate some remarkable forms of discrimination. A Maserati gets more respect than a Volkswagen Bug. Classic psychological studies have demonstrated that a drivers extend more patience and courtesy to motorists driving expensive cars than those in older, cheaper vehicles. In their seminal 1968 experiment, for example, Anthony N. Doob and Alan E. Gross found that drivers waited longer to honk at a high-priced car than when blocked by an old model. This builds on a wide body of research showing that people act more aggressively toward others of low social status.
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Does Your Sexual Orientation Shape Your Career Plans?
Lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals gained some new strides against discrimination this week when President Barack Obama announced plans to bar federal contractors from hiring or firing employees based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. But despite job protections, marriage equality laws and other protections that members of the LGB community are garnering, many of them believe their sexual identities will at some point encumber their careers, research indicates. And that expectation may have at least some degree of influence on their actual career choices.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Emotional and Behavioral Effects of Participating in an Online Study of Nonsuicidal Self-Injury: An Experimental Analysis Jennifer J. Muehlenkamp, Lance P. Swenson, Kristen L. Batejan, and Stephanie M. Jarvi Although there is a strong need for research on nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI), it can be difficult to obtain institutional review board (IRB) approval for these types of studies. IRBs often worry that asking participants about their NSSI experiences might in some way harm them.
